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As we know, modern technology has enabled us to take wonderful photos of the  human fetus living within his or her mother’s womb.  This is a great help to doctors in their care for the pre-born child.  However, it can also provide some with efficient means to invade this most sacred place – the very womb of a mother – and kill its helpless human    inhabitant.  As you may know, every hour about two hundred babies will be aborted in this country alone.  Just take a moment to think about this fact.  That means that about 120,000 babies per month and more than one million and six hundred thousand babies per year.

I’m sure all of us recoil in horror when we read or view on TV the holocausts that have been engineered by modern totalitarian governments.  The recent horrors in the   Middle East are still shocking.  The massacre of so many innocent men, women and children in our country and throughout the world by terrorists is truly unbelievable.  And through it all, we are rightly repulsed.  Yet today in our own country and indeed in our own “backyard”, millions of innocent babies die by abortion, and many others by abuse, and some among us call it progress or the right of freedom by choice.

The champions of abortion and assisted suicide, like Planned Parenthood or the National Abortion Action League try to justify this deliberate killing of human beings under the guise of preserving a “woman’s right to choose” or “dying with dignity”.  They literally spend millions of dollars each year to spread their secular propaganda rather than use that money to improve the quality of life for all human beings.  Many of our fellow Americans have been persuaded to believe that while abortion or assisted suicide does mean taking human life, it still must be allowed for the sake of free choice or the future happiness of all mankind. 

We need to question those slogans and clichés that continue to misrepresent and misinform us on these basic issues of life.  Consider for a moment the tired litany of distortion: “A woman has a right to control her own body…”, “an unplanned child will be an unwanted child…”, “abortion may be wrong, but I have no right to impose my morality on anybody else…”  We hear these slogans so often that they become “respectable” and therefore go unchallenged. 

Through it all, it would appear that these groups are stating that moral standards must begin by considering the feelings of the very people who are to be judged by them.  As Catholics we ought to remember that morality begins with God and with the revealed teachings of Jesus.  His teachings govern not only Christians, but also human  beings created by God and made in His image and likeness.  A system of morality based on emotions or on the subjective reflections of our own experience is no morality at all.  It could be the rationalization for immortality. 

This is Respect Life Month.  Please pray this month that all Americans increasingly give more time to think and to read and to research in order to arrive at the right answers to life issues.  There is much we can learn if only we continue to seek the Gospel Truth, which is given to us by Jesus Himself.

Tens of thousands of Americans will again march in Washington, D.C. on Friday, January 19, 2018 to continue their efforts to challenge our society to protect all innocent Human Life from conception until the Lord Himself calls us home.  Our prayers will be with all of them.